


eyes closed

by alligatorblood



Category: Twilight Series - All Media Types
Genre: F/F, a brief stop at isle esme but i still maintain we should eat the rich, honestly the cullen kidz all have so many issues, once again carine is 6'3, supportive lesbian vampire mothers!, vampire family antics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-18
Updated: 2020-10-18
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:27:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27090454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alligatorblood/pseuds/alligatorblood
Summary: Rosalie and Edward have a fight, Esme utilizes the power of love, and Emmett is practically an M.D.
Relationships: Carine Cullen/Esme Cullen, Rosalie Hale/Bella Swan
Comments: 4
Kudos: 120





	eyes closed

**Author's Note:**

> sort of a companion piece to This is What I Mean, but it's not necessary to read that one first. 
> 
> Carine/Esme makes me Feel Something, ok
> 
> find me on tumblr @rosedenali

The sunlight that filters through the gaps in the trees hums against their skin as they run. Carine moves so fluidly, it's as if she's gliding through the thick woods, and Esme forever chases her shadow, a glimpse of her golden hair.

Esme stops with a hand against the mossy trunk of a tree, feeling somehow breathless. In the best way. The hunting trip had been short, the race home, spontaneous. All it took was a single look and a twitch of a smile and they were off.

"It's not fair," she calls out.

Carine slows and doubles back to meet her. "What isn't?"

"You're faster than I am."

Carine laughs. A century's time hasn't dulled the sway Esme feels at the sound. Carine's mouth turns upward, playful, and Esme thinks a century more couldn't dream of changing an atom between them. "You manage when you need to. I've always loved that, you know. Of course you know."

"Maybe. Part of me likes to hear you say it." Esme takes her outstretched hand and they walk slowly toward the break in the trees together. The day is bright and clear, rare in too many ways. For such a small town, they sure take so much of her time down at the hospital.

Esme looks at their hands, interlocked and glowing in the pale sunlight. The air is dry around them, and when Esme looks up, Carine is already looking, a softness in her eyes that feels akin to gravity.

"You haven't the right to look the way you do," she mutters. "I should be lucky not to take a patient's life lost in the thought of you."

This time it's Esme who laughs. "The things you say, I swear." She looks in the direction of home, their perfectly well-behaved and civil children. "We've been gone all day. What are the odds we still have a house to return to?"

"Slim."

.

Rosalie rips Edward's arm from his shoulder and beats him over the head with it. He doesn't even try to defend himself. For some reason, that only darkens her vision. She grabs him by the shirt and flings him into the treetops. She tears through the trees to catch him before he lands just so she can slam him into the dirt herself.

"I'm sorry!" Edward shouts.

"You don't _get_ to be sorry!"

"Rose, stop!" Emmett wraps his arms around her and yanks her off of Edward. She flails in his grasp, blind with wrath.

Alice leaps from the balcony with his detached arm in her hands. She pulls Edward from the crater in the ground and shoves his arm in his chest. "You guys! Mom's going to kill us! _All_ of us!"

"Let go of me!" Rose struggles uselessly in Emmett's iron grip. She pounds on his forearms with her fists and kicks her legs, but he knows better than to let her free when she's like this.

" _What_ is going on here?" The voice cuts through the woods behind the house. In a fraction of an instant, their mothers are standing before them, back early from their hunting trip. Carine takes in the horrific display of her children. Rarely has any of them seen her so disappointed.

"Explain yourselves," she says quietly. "Now."

Rose stills in Emmett's arms. Trembling with anger, she points at Edward. "Ask. Him."

Carine nods at Emmett. With a grave degree of uncertainty, he releases Rose, stepping back as she blurs away from all of them.

Esme reaches out to Edward, but he flinches away, ashamed. He looks to Carine instead. "You should get to the hospital."

"What?"

"Please," he says, strangely desperate.

Esme puts her hand on Carine's shoulder. She can feel her indecision, the urge to get to the bottom of this against the pull to do as her son has asked. After all, he wouldn't ask anything of either of them unless it was urgent.

"Go," Esme says. "I've got them here. It's alright."

Carine gives them all one last apprehensive look before heading for the house.

.

Esme holds Edward's hand as Emmett lines up the detached arm to its socket. Carine and Jasper are usually the ones to call for this sort of thing, but they're working with what they have for the moment.

"Shouldn't we wait for Mom," Edward asks, eyeing his separated limb.

"Nah, I watched a YouTube video. I'm practically an M.D. at this point," Emmett says. "Ready?"

Edward grits his teeth in response, and Emmett snaps his arm back into place with one quick motion. The noise is awful, like grinding marble. Emmett shudders and backs off with a grimace.

"Thank you, Emmett," Esme calls after him.

"It's _Doctor_ Emmett from now on," he says as he climbs the stairs.

She turns back to Edward and frowns at the placid look on his face. "How does it feel?"

"She hates me. _Really_ hates me, like no one else." He hangs his head, dejected. "I should have let her rip the other one off too."

In the early days of their time together, they were hardly a family. Carine tried to keep them balanced, but Esme could scarcely break from the delirium of thirst, and Edward often disappeared for weeks at a time only to return worse off than before and wracked with guilt. It took almost a decade for the houses they lived in to start feeling like homes. For her to be able to focus enough to get knocked over by the worry that filled her when Edward failed to return from his outings. But eventually, the three of them grew into something familiar, something she could almost recall from her former life.

Now, almost a hundred years later, she believes the only person on this earth who understands Edward better than herself is Carine.

"What happened? What could you have possibly done to deserve your arms ripped off?"

He looks her in the eye then. His shame is sharp. "I almost got Bella killed."

.

At the hospital, Carine shines a penlight into Bella Swan's eyes.

Jasper was waiting out front when she got there. He told her about the accident at the high school. A boy lost control of his car coming into the parking lot. He was headed straight for Bella, and when Rose went to save her, Edward tried to hold her back.

"I think…you'll live," she says, lowering the light.

Bella gives her father a look that says _I told you so._

"No signs of head trauma, but I'd keep an eye on her," Carine says to Chief Swan who can barely manage anything but the rough look at the boy sitting on the next bed. Presumably, the driver.

"Can you tell Rose thank you for me?" Bella says, tucking her hair behind her ears on both sides. "She sort of disappeared after, but if she didn't push me out of the way, I don't know…"

"Sure," Carine says warmly. She has a pretty good idea where Rose went.

"And Jasper too. For staying with me."

Charlie turns to the driver again and lists off what's going to happen to him. Bella takes the opportunity to say what she really wanted to. "She's not in trouble, right? I mean, no one saw her. Not even Tyler."

It's touching that Bella would worry about something like that. But by now they are all pretty well-versed in talking their way out of the odd things they might do in front of humans. Still, a display of superhuman speed is just the kind of thing they should be avoiding. It's why Edward tried to stop her. Stupidly. Carine has never feared Rosalie in the least, but she also wouldn't dare step between her and something she truly wanted.

"I wouldn't worry about it," Carine whispers back.

.

Rose lingers indecisively outside of the study where her mothers are sitting and quietly talking through what went on today. By now, they both know what happened in that parking lot. At least Edward's version, though it's probably not much different from her own if she's honest. And if she's really honest, she can still feel the rage gnawing at her.

The door opens, and Esme steps out. She only has to look at Rose a moment before her eyes soften. "She's alright, you know. Because of you."

Rose nods, rage liquefying. She remembers in a rush the wrench of terror she felt when Bella's eyes widened at the van barreling toward her. If vampirism would let her cry, she would sob. Not that it can stop her from trying anyway.

"Oh, Rose," Esme says, hugging her tightly.

In 1933, when Carine's venom ate her bruises and burned away her humanity, it was Esme who sat beside the bed, barely a shadow in her memory, but she was _there_ always. Half in the grave, Rose mistook her for an angel come to take her away. Today, she realizes quite fully how much she relies on her mother. On both of them.

"I'm sorry," she says quietly.

"I know."

.

A few hours later, Carine finds Rosalie on the balcony. The sun is just beginning to rise, but from the look of the clouds, the day is marked for drear. She comes up beside Rose and rests her hands on the railing. The crater from earlier is filled in. If she had to guess, she'd say it was Jasper. He feels guilty for not being here to calm everyone down. But it was Rose who told him to stay with Bella.

"Care to explain the amputation of your brother?"

Rose turns her head sharply and steps back from the railing. "You know why I did it."

"I understand you're angry. That what Edward did felt like a threat to Bella. And you." Carine says evenly. "However, I like to think we've raised you better than fits of violence."

Anger flashes in her eyes stoked out of nowhere. "You didn't raise me at all. You got me just like this, and this is all I'll ever be."

It's a lie of course, but it stings like most things Rose has said over the years. Just how sadness has a hold on Edward, Rose is often caught in the teeth of anger. It's faded slightly over the years, but sometimes Carine sees that girl in the wedding dress, stalking the men who left her to rot. Back then, she was beyond wrath, somehow crossed over into joy.

Carine frowns. "You don't mean that."

Rose sighs and shakes her head, subdued. "No, I'm sorry. I'm just…"

She presses her hand gently to the back of her shoulder. "It's okay."

Rosalie shrugs uncomfortably under her hand, but when she looks up, her sincerity cannot be questioned. "I know it might be wrong of me to say of the woman who brought me up, but _you're_ my real mother. And Esme. You raised me. I don't remember my human life at all. Just the end of it. _That_ stuck out. But the rest is like…a memory I only have because of a picture or a story somebody else told me. It could have been anyone's life." She steps up to the railing again. "Which is why I'm glad you and Mom gave me this one. And I'm sorry about Edward. I've apologized to him, and I don't want this to get in the way of your trip. We can handle being alone for a few weeks, I promise. It will never happen again."

Carine laughs, amused to be reminded of her anniversary trip at such a time. "It better not."

.

A month later, Bella slides into Rose's room in her socks. Probably on accident. Rose can never tell when she's being clumsy on purpose.

She grabs the poster of the bed to stop herself. "When were you going to tell me you guys have your own island?"

Rose shrugs. "Carine bought it for Esme. I've only been there a handful of times. I forget about it most of the time."

"That's probably the richest thing anybody's ever said." Bella sighs when the only reaction she gets out of her girlfriend is another shrug. Unwilling to give up, she climbs onto the bed and sits beside her. "So, Emmett told me you tore off Edward's arm?"

Rose shoots her a look, but Bella's stupid smile throws her off a little. "Yes."

"Was it funny?" Bella asks, pressing their shoulders together.

Rose smiles. "Kind of."

.

Seven thousand miles away, Carine emerges from a waterfall, glowing like the sun itself. Esme thinks that humans would have to be vain beyond measure to _ever_ believe she could be one of them.

She runs up the beach to Esme's blanket. Her blond hair is dark with water that drips all over Esme when she leans down to kiss her. When she pulls away she chuckles quietly. "Just say it. I know you want to."

Esme huffs. She used to be much harder to read. At least, she'd like to think so. "I miss them."

Carine laughs, triumphant. She lies down on the blanket, shoulder pressed to Esme's thigh. "Next time, I'll pack one of them in my suitcase. Probably Alice. She'd fit."

"Don't be silly. If you're going to bring Alice, you might as well bring Emmett too."

"I'll need a bigger suitcase."

"And if you bring Emmett-"

"Alright, I get it." Carine rises up on her elbows. "I suppose after all these years, I'm not enough on my own."

"You're more than enough, _believe_ me." She squeezes Carine's shoulder, her skin cool from the water.

"Shall I move up our return flight?"

Esme thinks of home. Of Emmett's wall of busted Xbox controllers, of Alice's fascination with flinging herself off of every raised surface. Edward's accordion days. Jasper when he riles everybody up for fun. Rosalie when she remembers her harp for a week every seven months.

"No…a little time away is better. For everyone."

"I couldn't agree more."

.

Later that evening, Esme ghosts her fingers along the spines of Carine's prized book collection. She passes a watercolor on the wall painted by Alice, a gift from about five years ago. She called her technique _eyes closed._

When she sees one of Edward's sheet music binders tucked into the shelf, she stops and looks at Carine over on the couch, reading something bound in heavy leather.

"Edward and Rosalie, do you think... Is it possible they've come to an understanding? Ever since the accident, they've been getting along better. Somehow." She sighs and clasps her hands together, thoughts a little more jumbled than she realized. "Sometimes it all surprises me. I never dreamed I'd be a mother again." The end feels stitched on, but she trusts Carine to be gentle. Always.

Carine closes her book. "Edward writes symphonies in your honor, I'm sure. And Rose looks up to you. I see her trying to impress you, prove she's more loving than her brother." She crinkles her nose at the last word and Esme feels light "They love you. All five of them. They don't want to disappoint you."

"They could never."

"You know our children. How they _love_ a challenge."

Esme smiles fondly. She passes a few more frames on the wall. "Did you want children, before? In your human life?"

Carine rises slowly from the couch and shelves her book. Her fingertips linger on the spine for a moment before she shakes her head once. "I loved my work. I disliked my suitors. Not a single one of them had half the heart I desired. I had my patients, and two hundred years later, I had you."

Esme wonders if falling in love ever stops. If it ever reaches a point where the ground catches you. Perhaps Carine's sunbeam smile is the closest she's ever been to the very end of love.

"Today is the happiest I've been, you know," Carine says in earnest. "I can only imagine tomorrow."


End file.
